Friday, May 6

No good outcome was likely.

Since this blog does feature the occasional bit of politics, I suppose I really ought to comment on the results.

First off, I didn't vote. I'm not apathetic. I would very much like to vote, and only wish there were some party out there I could bring myself to vote for. But there isn't.

If we had a presidential system, I would have voted for Blair, to show support for his foreign policy. But we don't, and there's no way I could have voted Labour  on principle, because they're authoritarian class-war-fighting police-state-creating thought-criminalising statists; tactically, because they're so stupid that they really think they don't need Blair and will therefore ditch him shortly; and literally, because they do not allow the residents of Northern Ireland to vote for them. (In fact, Northern Ireland is the only place on the planet where you are not allowed to join the British Labour Party. That alone is a good reason never to vote for the bastards.)

Much as Ian Duncan Smith was derided, he seemed to be taking the Tories in the right sort of direction: an emphasis on the freedom of the individual, removing state control from parts of our lives that we're perfectly capable of running for ourselves. The Tories didn't just ditch him; they ditched that entire ideology, electing Michael Howard, the man who, as Home Secretary, tried and failed to introduce the national ID card scheme that Labour are finally going to succeed with. Unsurprisingly, he's a keen admirer of the people who are finishing the work he began, and has turned the Conservative Party into a party that's almost exactly like New Labour, but not quite.

So that was the choice we were faced with: re-elect the Labour police state, or elect a new Tory police state, thus giving the Tories the message that becoming more like Labour leads to greater success, thus encouraging them to become even more like Labour. Reduced state spending and state control simply weren't on the menu. It wasn't a choice worth making, so I didn't. Labour won, as I've been predicting since 2001.

Yet there was one surprise: George Galloway beat Oona King. This one event has given me a lower opinion of the electorate than any other in my lifetime. Let's set aside all that we're-not-pro-Saddam-we're-anti-war bollocks. The people of Bethnal Green & Bow elected the pro-Saddam candidate, not to mention the pro-Soviet-Union candidate. May they get what they've voted for.